How To Persuade Your Client to Start Blogging

25Apr10

Courtesy of flickr.com user Mike Lincht NotionsCapital.com

Note: This blog post is written from the perspective of a young public relations practitioner (and social media junkie). It’s written for the benefit of other practitioners and for companies that are on the fence about starting a blog. Hopefully, it will be beneficial and educational for both.

I know I’m not the only public relations practitioner who’s had trouble, in the past, convincing clients to jump on the social media bandwagon. There are a number of reasons why clients are resistant to blogging. These are the reasons I hear the most often:

“We don’t have time.”

“We don’t know what to write about.”

“We don’t want to give away company secrets.”

For public relations practitioners, it’s important to sympathize with clients when they have these concerns. Simply telling them over and over again how great blogging is won’t change their minds. It’ll probably just annoy them.

The fact of the matter is that many clients don’t really understand what a blog is, let alone what value can come from it. In their heart of hearts, they may have an idea of why they should blog. But they probably hit a wall when thinking about the bottom line: “What’s in it for me?”

When put on the spot, sometimes it’s hard to come up with a good answer. So next time your client asks you any form of this question, present him or her with the following list of benefits that companies get from keeping blogs.

Blogging: What’s in it for Your Company?

Increased awareness of your brand and what you’re selling. Blogs are, in a sense, dirt-cheap advertisements. (But it’s very important that your content doesn’t look or sound like an ad, which I’ll talk about in my next post.) Blogs give potential customers a chance to learn about your company, your key messages, and your products.

More return on public relations/ marketing investment, according to a Ragan article. But you don’t have to take mine or Ragan’s word for it. Hubspot conducted a study last summer that compared website performance of companies that blog with website performance of companies that don’t. The findings were as follows: Companies that blogged had 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages. The proof is in the numbers, people!

Positioning as an expert in your field. When you’re blogging about a topic related to your industry, you’re positioning yourself as an expert. This helps to build customers’ (or potential customers’) trust in your brand. Then, when they’re thinking about purchasing their next doo-dad (or whatever it is that you’re selling), your company’s name will pop up early in their thought process.

A chance to communicate with key stakeholders. I could go on for days about the importance of two-way communication between companies and stakeholders, but I’ll spare you from my rant. Just trust me when I say that it’s important. I will also point out that blogs provide a perfect outlet for customer service. They also present new opportunities to improve products and cater to your customers. Customers now EXPECT companies to have a two-way vehicle, like a blog, to communicate with them. If a company doesn’t have such a vehicle, then it’s at an incredible disadvantage.

So, there you have it, folks! If those aren’t compelling reasons why companies should blog, then I don’t know what are!

But after you’ve persuaded your client that blogging is the thing to do, and companies, after you’ve been persuaded, then what’s the next step? It’s not enough to simply engage in social media. Engagement, especially corporate engagement, needs to be done the right way to yield results. So, check out my next blog post: